How people describe their place: identifying predominant types of place descriptions

People communicate about locations using place descriptions. Despite the growth of mobile location- and context-aware applications, the automatic interpretation of place descriptions remains a challenge. Currently no software tools exist that are capable of understanding complex verbal spatial language. This paper explores a corpus of place descriptions collected through crowdsourcing mechanisms within a mobile game. It introduces a general classification scheme to annotate place descriptions according to different characteristic parameters and uses this scheme to demonstrate the existence of certain clusters of prevalent types of place descriptions in human communication. Research outcomes contribute to the common understanding of the way people refer to places, which is essential to support the development of intelligent tools and location based technologies.